This is when one would yearn for an entire library stored on a single, slim, 2-pound device, right? 50 boxes in and still packing, I couldn’t disagree more. Packing up our library for the third time in as many years, my husband and I pause over the volumes that shaped those lives — and our life together. The books we read (together!) in high school, the books we gave each other (a first edition of Anagrams!), the books given to us by people who are no longer with us, the broken spines that fall open to the favorite poem, to recite again…

There is room in this society for any kind of technology that brings books to more people, that expands our notions of what kinds of containers information comes in, that enlarges our assumptions about who controls that information… and that allows us to increase font-size as our eyes decrease in acuity! But, for better or for worse, there is no room for such a device in this house. It’s too full of books.

I love books, period. Don’t care about size or portability issues. I love the privacy, the feel of the printed page, the heft, the intimacy of owning one’s personal copy of something. .. My absolute favorite thing to do is pack a picnic lunch and drive out to the beach and sit in my car and read. Listening to the waves, smelling the ocean, lost in my (and the author’s) own little world. Sigh….

Search Blog Archives

Flying Pigs, Swimming Hummingbirds

Homage to the Women of Portrait of a Bookstore

Hidden Altar-
-tucked-
Where sprites bristle with Eve
and flow freely
No one considered
the ritual
no one thought it up-
out of book and prayer
twinned with time
came free spirits...
Tiny silken moth
fluttering by
accidentally brushes
the heart...
...light passes
and Eve listens
to lost Romeo
or Aristotle
or Cain
with same forgiving ear...